alt Hacker NewsThat sounds like a reasonable aim. Online services should be responsible for implementing age verification checks on content that children shouldn't be accessing, just like vendors of alcohol and nicotine products are responsible for age verification.
The EFF likes to frame everything that might even slightly rein in online service providers as being a terrible assault on online freedom and therefore, in their view, shouldn't be done. But I don't see them coming up with any better solutions. Just endless complaints, while soliciting donations to keep generating these endless complaints.
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What content shouldn't children be accessing? Is the content a 7, 11 or 16 year old shouldn't access different between age brackets? Who makes that determination? Is this access restriction at the whole site level, or per-post? Does safe-harbor apply, or is a site-operator liable for age-inappropriate content it hosts for its clients? On S3, for example, is each object tagged with an age category, or would it have to be a totally separate S3, like GovCloud?
Nah, it should be like in California. When you set up an account you should put how old thr user is, and websites should get a header that says whether it's over 18 or not. No ID checks, just good parenting.
Aims aside, did you even read the article? This will mostly end anonymity online and require heavier policing of content.
A child might see something they shouldn't walking down the street, strolling thru the park, visiting the local zoo, or visiting an ice cream parlor. Should those places be requiring identification and hiring extra security guards to wander around making sure nobody is saying it doing anything politically objectionable?
Let's not accept creeping digital tyranny with self-assuring complacency... call or write (preferably snail mail) your congresspeople!!
I hate this analogy because it isn't true. This isn't like a clerk checking your age before you buy booze this is like a clerk taking a photocopy of your ID and a list of everything you bought and then storing those records forever every time you buy alcohol.
> vendors of alcohol and nicotine products are responsible for age verification.
You don't wind up in a database for buying alcohol.
This proposal puts your name right next to the category of porn you're into, which will be a great way to coerce all those politicians into voting for the "correct" bill. Would be a shame if they found out a state senator watched porn, so maybe they'd better vote yes on the proposal.
In time, this will be used to shape what people are "allowed" to think. Porn will gradually be purged from the internet and then go away entirely as the US becomes more fundamentalist and Christian.
Then people who are neither of those things will start to be denied jobs and loans. Politicians that don't fit the mold will stop winning.
This is about turning the US to Christianity. (Read: this is really about controlling the massses and using religious fundamentalism as a tool to do so.)
Technology is the perfect tool for control. Just as we were becoming a liberal/libertarian society and letting people live their lives how they wanted, the wrong people started using technology not as an enabler of free minds, but as an inescapable straitjacket.
You've read 1984, right?
The sensors have been widely deployed. The internet will become your Big Brother. You won't be able to buy, sell, or even move between state lines without being in the good graces of the state.
Be a good citizen and comply.
There's a big difference here, in the US anyways, neither alcohol nor nicotine have first amendment protections. Basically all content delivered over the US does.
That's a much thornier legal issue